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IBM RFE Community: How to vote for RFEs

IBM® developerWorks Advisory Software Engineer David
Salinas explains the software request for enhancement process and shows you
how to vote for an RFE on the IBM RFE Community in Part 4 of a five-part video series on how to
participate in efforts to make your technology stronger.

Scott Laningham, host of developerWorks podcasts, was previously editor of developerWorks newsletters. Prior to IBM, he was an award-winning reporter and director for news programming featured on Public Radio International, a freelance writer for the American Communications Foundation and CBS Radio, and a songwriter/musician.

Your narrator is IBM® developerWorks Advisory Software
Engineer David Salinas: Hello. My name is David Salinas. I
work at IBM®. I work at the IBM developerWorks website supporting the
IBM RFE Community. Today's tutorial is going to be regarding vote for an
RFE where we will be walking through the process on how to vote for an
RFE.

To do that we're going to go through a series of steps.

First we're going to do go to the IBM RFE Community, and then we're going
to search for an RFE, and we're going to do that by selecting our criteria
so that we can have a successful search for the RFEs that we'd be
interested in.

Once we actually find a search ... find an RFE in the search results, then
we'll click on it to view the RFE record. From there, in the RFE's action
section, we'll be able to vote for that RFE. And then finally, to get a
view of all the RFEs we voted on, we'll go to the My votes page, see all
the RFEs we've been actually able to vote for on the RFE Community.

Figure 1. The steps to vote for an
RFE

So to get us started, let's go to the IBM RFE Community. So this is the
general landing page for the IBM RFE Community.

Figure 2. The RFE Community

Notice that I am currently logged in with my ID. You'll see that in the
upper righthand side. This is my display name, which is the ... or screen
name, what is shown next to all my activity, all my public activity on the
IBM RFE Community.

When you're on the IBM RFE Community with regard to votes, there's a quick
way once you're logged in to be able to see which RFEs you voted for.
Under the My stuff section, by clicking on the radio button next to My
stuff. The My stuff section will be updated to show the RFEs you currently
voted for. In this case, I voted for two RFEs.

So this quickly provides you a way to see number of RFEs you voted for and
to be able to click on those individual entries to view the RFE records.
In this case, we don't want to remove a vote. Since we've already voted
for these RFEs, probably you don't want to necessarily go back to them
right now. So instead, we want to vote for an RFE, so that means finding a
new RFE.

So what we're going to do is go to search. There's another tutorial regarding how to search for RFEs [video], so as a
consequence I'm not going to go through how to use searches and with
respect to all of the individual fields and criteria in order to narrow
down your search results.

Instead, I know I'm interested in a very specific RFE. It's one that I
submitted earlier. So I'm going to go and click on this tab.

Figure 3. Finding an earlier submission
to vote on

Search by RFE IDs or routing numbers. Here I'm going to be able to provide
an exact RFE ID for the RFE I'm interested in. In this case I'm going to
provide 12179.

Go ahead and click the search button, and then it will show me the one RFE
record that has an ID. I'm going to click on the individual record, and it
will take me to the view RFE record for the RFE.

Figure 4. The RFE record

Notice that I can be able to ... I'm sorry, this is a RFE actually I did
not submit; this is an RFE I am interested in. So what you'll notice here
is that it already has one vote and two people are watching it. I'm not
one of those people that has voted for it nor is it on my watch list, but
this RFE is very interesting for me because it's against the IBM RFE
Community with respect to providing accessibility support.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and vote for this. And by
clicking add votes, the record will be updated to indicate now I can
remove my vote if I like. And notice the number of votes for this RFE is
now two instead of one.

Additionally, I'm going to add it to my watch list so I can get
notifications on it. By clicking add to my watch list, the number of
people watching it now is three instead of two. So I've already added this
RFE to my record as far as for getting notifications.

So what I'm going to go ahead do now is click My votes under My stuff.
What this will show me is all the RFEs I've actually voted for.

Figure 5. My votes helps you keep track
of your votes

It tells me at the top I've voted for three RFEs. You can filter the RFEs
you voted for by a particular brand in case you wanted to see where your
RFEs, where your votes have been mainly submitted against, which brand.

In this case, I'm going to go ahead with the default view because I only
have three records. Notice that the record that I just voted for, 12179,
is listed. From this page, I have the ability to remove a vote if I wanted
to, if I didn't want to vote for that RFE any longer.

So, for example, if an RFE has been delivered and since it's been
delivered it doesn't really need my vote anymore to encourage IBM to
consider it, I would go ahead and click the remove vote and my vote would
be removed. Notice also that you can get all the information about all the
RFEs you've voted for, download it to a .CSV file, or you can get access
to it through RSS as well.

And so, where does this bring us? So this brings us to the point where
we've gone through the tutorial, to be able to search for RFEs, find the
one that we're interested in. Once we're actually looking at that record,
to add our vote to that RFE, and then go to My votes page and you'll see
all the RFE you've voted for. And furthermore, be able to get access to
that same information through either RSS or download it as a .CSV file for
our own offline manipulation and evaluation as well.

And so, all this activity, of course, has happened on the IBM RFE
Community. In case you're not familiar with that URL, it's listed here for
you. So we hope that by walking through this tutorial on how to vote for
RFEs so that that information can be used by IBM as it considers a product
enhancement request out there, to understand which ones the community is
most interested in seeing implemented.

We hope that now you for being walked through this process will go ahead
and take the opportunity and go participate on the IBM RFE Community and
vote for RFEs that you would like to see implemented or reconsidered by
the IBM team. Thank you for your usage of the IBM RFE Community.

The first time you sign into developerWorks, a profile is created for you. Information in your profile (your name, country/region, and company name) is displayed to the public and will accompany any content you post, unless you opt to hide your company name. You may update your IBM account at any time.